The growth for the fourth quarter of 2010 was also reduced to 2.3%, meaning that for the last nine months the economy has grown a minimal 1.5%, barely treading water as the weekend Wall Street Journal described it. For comparison purposes, economic growth during the first seven quarters of the Reagan recovery in the 1980s boomed at an average of 7.1%. Economic growth during the first seven quarters of the Obama non-recovery has now been reduced to an average of 2.6%, barely a third as much.

Historically, as the Journal also reiterated, “the deeper the recession, the more robust the recovery.” So the idea that the recovery is so bad because the recession was so bad doesn’t wash. Based on the historical pattern, we should be in the second year of a booming recovery by now. President Obama? instead is mired in three and a half years of stagnation with worse to come.

Keynesian Economics, RIP
This catastrophic failure for America’s working people has resulted from President Obama doggedly following exactly the opposite of Reaganomics in every detail. In particular, Obama came into office with his Rip Van Winkle attitude pretending not to notice that anything has happened since 1981, and returning to the failed Keynesian economics of the 1970s with a vengeance.

As the Journal explained it this weekend, President Obama “deployed the entire arsenal of neo-Keynesian policies to lift domestic demand,” including “nearly a $1 trillion in stimulus, plus a battalion of temporary and targeted programs: cash for clunkers, cash for caulkers, tax credits for homebuyers, 99 weeks of jobless benefits, ‘clean energy’ grants, subsidies to states, and so much more.”

Keynesian economics is the doctrine that economic growth and revival is caused by increased government spending and deficits. The increased spending and deficits are supposed to increase aggregate demand for goods and services, which supposedly causes producers to produce more. If you listen to President Obama carefully, he is always saying that economic growth and prosperity comes from increased government spending.

If the idea that increased government spending and deficits create prosperity doesn’t seem to make sense, that’s because it doesn’t. Keynesian economics has never worked, not when it was born in the 1930s and not when it finally crashed and burned in the 1970s with double-digit inflation, roaring unemployment, and deep recession all at the same time. That is supposed to be impossible under Keynesian economics, because you can’t have both too little aggregate demand (the supposed cause of recession and unemployment) and too much aggregate demand (the supposed cause of inflation) at the same time.

The central fallacy behind Keynesian economics is that the money for the increased government spending and deficits has to come from somewhere. If the government borrows a trillion dollars out of the private sector to spend a trillion back into the private sector, it hasn’t done anything to increase the economy on net. If it seizes a trillion dollars in taxes out of the private sector to finance the trillion of increased spending, the result is worse. The economy has not been expanded on net, and the increased taxes reduce the incentives for production, resulting in a net loss to the economy.

Keynesian economics survives not as a matter of logic, but because it provides cover for what the politicians want to do: increase spending and deficits to buy votes for their political machines. For a Chicago machine politician like Barack Obama, that is catnip.

The Failure of President Obama
What drives economic growth and prosperity, however, is not government spending and deficits, but incentives for production. That was the insight behind Reaganomics, and the reason why it was so successful.

Lower tax rates increase the incentives for production by allowing producers to keep more of what they produce. Deregulation increases incentives for production by reducing the costs of production, increasing the resulting reward. Restrained, anti-inflation monetary policy expands the incentives for investment to increase production because investors know the value of their investment will not be depreciated by inflation and a declining dollar. Reduced government spending and deficits reduce the government drain on private-sector investment funds.

Moreover, these are not policies suited for a particular time and its policy challenges. These are timeless free-market economic policies enduring for all time. As I argue in my new book, America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, if we would only restore these planks of Reaganomics, within a year the economy would take off on a new, generation-long economic boom. As the Journal again said this weekend, “The only way out of this mess is to return to the growth policies that nurtured the boom of the 1980s.”

The disgrace of Obamanomics is that its rigid, unreconstructed Keynesian economics was discredited in both theory and practice over 30 years ago. The historic success of Reaganomics was a demonstrated fact for all the world to see (and subsequently imitate) over 20 years ago. But President Rip Van Winkle, playacting dumb, takes us back to the future of the 1970s, reflecting the devout prep-school Marxism of his youth.

He is not the only one. Witness the spectacle of the equally self-absorbed Ezra Klein , who in his uninformed blog for the Washington Post just last month ridiculed the Republican Cut, Cap and Balance Plan for failing the test of Keynesian economics. He writes:

The only way to prevent massive layoffs, the only way to give the unemployed some help and the underpaid some relief, is for the federal government to spend. And yet we want to write into the Constitution a requirement that spending remain at 18 percent of the previous year’s GDP? That is to say, a requirement that the federal government needs to make recessions worse rather than drawing on its unique capacity to make them better? Are we mad?

Klein is blissfully unaware that there is even any dispute over Keynesian economics, let alone that it was thoroughly discredited 30 years ago, and replaced by an historical success proven over 20 years ago. Indeed, he is so behind the curve in recognizing the economic policy debate that he indicates that anyone who doesn’t genuflect to the 1930s wisdom of Keynesian economics must be “mad.” That only raises, and answers, the question of whether Klein can helpfully comment on today’s politics and public policy in America when he is not even following, let alone understanding, a central, decades-old, fundamental economic policy debate.

That is apparently not a problem for the Washington Post, which institutionally presents an open question of whether it is so behind the curve of what is happening in America today that it can even cover and report on current politics adequately for its readers. Certainly no one relying on that paper for political coverage in 2010 would have had any idea of the New Deal-sized political earthquake coming in November. That little item was first predicted in this space, by contrast, in 2009.

But arguably even worse: the New York Times, whose resident economics scholar, Paul Krugman, argues that the only thing wrong with the Keynesianism of Obamanomics is that the spending stimulus wasn’t several times bigger. He offers as his model the spending of World War II. Federal spending in 1943 was 43.6% of GDP, with the federal deficit at 30.3% of GDP. In today’s equivalent terms, that would mean a federal budget of $6.54 trillion, or over 70% higher than today, and a federal deficit of $4.55 trillion, almost 3 times higher than today.

Talk about mad. The runaway Keynesian spending spree we have already suffered has driven the nation to the edge of bankruptcy. Do we have to drive America over the bankruptcy cliff before Krugman acknowledges the proven failure of Keynesian economics? The answer is no, because his devotion to the doctrine is religious, not intellectual, and so it can’t be falsified.

Professor Richard Rumelt of the UCLA Anderson School of Management timely reviews the economics of World War II spending and other policies in the weekend Journal. He explains that it wasn’t Keynesian-increased consumption from all that World War II spending that ended the Depression, writing:

Government policy didn’t stimulate personal consumption, as Keynesian policy makers aim to do today. During World War II, there was no investment in civilian infrastructure and the government placed severe restrictions on consumption.… Thrift restored personal balance sheets, ultimately setting the stage for the postwar boom.

Rumelt adds that contrary to Keynesian economics:

During the 1941-1945 war years, over 22% of disposable income was saved. This high savings rate was driven by fiat. Thanks to wartime rationing, Americans were only allowed to purchase small amounts of sugar, butter, meat, gasoline, tires, shoes, bicycles, processed foods and other goods. Plus, there was virtually no production of new cars, radios, home appliances, or housing. In fact, when inflation and increased working hours are taken into account, consumption per hour worked actually declined for the bulk of civilians during the war. Civilian living standards stayed at Depression-era levels.

Rumelt explains that it was actually after World War II, when government spending was reduced by nearly two-thirds as a percent of GDP, and the deficit was nearly wiped out, that the economy boomed. The foundation for that boom was not the Keynesian consumption spending of the World War II years, but the increased personal savings and debt repayment of those years. So Krugman completely misinterprets the government spending effects of the war years.

The more sophisticated (I would argue sophistic) defense of the tragic failure of Obamanomics states that recoveries that follow financial panics are supposedly slower. But that has not been the experience of the American economy. Over the last 70 years, recessions in America have previously lasted only 10 months on average, with the longest previously being 16 months. Moreover, again, the deeper the downturn, the stronger the recovery. Yet, we are three and a half years beyond the last recession’s starting date, and there has been no effective recovery.

It was only the Great Depression itself, prolonged with Keynesian economics, where the human suffering dragged on for over a decade. Historically, recessions or downturns have often been accompanied by financial panics, a classic feature of the business cycle. The sophistry of this argument is just an attempt to devise a political excuse for the failure of President Obama and his outdated, benighted economic policies.

HT: American Spectator

Every price increase of just a dime per gallon of gasoline at the pump extracts approximately $5 billion from the pockets of U.S. consumers over the course of a year.

On top of killing family budgets, with a dollar per gallon jump at the pumps picking our pockets of $50 billion per year, there is on the macro level an inverse relationship between the price of oil and the overall health of the economy — oil price hikes deliver less job growth, less demand for labor, more unemployment, more poverty, more inequality, more inflation, lower real income increases, and smaller advances in the standard of living.

Additionally, higher oil prices directly cause greater amounts of U.S. capital to be exported, both to pay the higher prices and to pay for the growing levels of imported oil.

In 1985, the U.S. imported 25 percent of its oil usage. Today, it’s 61 percent. And still we are placing restrictions on increases in domestic production, both for oil and other sources of energy.

A few days back, President Obama, rather than sticking around a couple hours to explain to the American people or to the U.S. Congress why we were going to war in Libya, flew off to Brazil to hand out a permit to allow deep sea oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to Brazil’s state-run oil company, Petrobras. Capitalist companies in America need not apply.

This particular foreign deal was an especially snug and nostalgic fit for Obama. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff is somewhat of a Latin form of Obama’s old Weather Underground chum Bernardine Dohrn.

In earlier days, Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla, was charged with running with a gang of redistributionists who accumulated revolutionary capital by way of kidnapping foreign diplomats for ransom.

A top priority for Rousseff today mirrors the “spread the wealth around” objective that Obama stated to Joe the plumber.

Dohrn, just home from a trip to Cuba in 1969 where she hoped to pick up some pointers on how to impose a “classless” society on the U.S., displayed her true psychopathic colors in a speech she made to the Weathermen’s “War Council.”

Speaking elatedly of the murders by the Charlie Manson gang of actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and three other people, Dohrn proclaimed, “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victims’ stomachs! Wild!”

That’s the fully hateful Bernardine on public display, seeing herself as a new George Washington, a revolutionary fighter for a new nation. It’s the same role, except this founding mother was in serious need of a super-sized bottle of antipsychotic drugs and a super-tight straightjacket.

Of all the places for candidate Obama to kick off his political career in 1995 in his first run for the Illinois State Senate, he picked the living room of Bernardine Dohrn and husband Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground and, more recently, the national vice president for curriculum studies at the American Educational Research Association.

I’d have kept up my guard when Bernardine sashayed out of the kitchen and began circulating around with the hors d’oeuvres and metal forks.

In any case, it’s no surprise that things are coming apart, especially on energy. “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can,” pronounced Obama during the presidential campaign. “It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

What’s the end game? “Suicide Mission Accomplished”?

HT: American Spectator

Amid all the turmoil, he discusses an apparently world historical issue of school bullying; honors the 2009-10 Stanley Cup Champion Chicago Blackhawks; delivers a radio address on another all-important subject, “Women’s History Month;” attends a fund-raiser; goes golfing (that darned weather: it was just too nice for the President to resist the temptation of hitting the links — for the 61st time in his two plus years in office); yuks it up with the Washington press corps (pronounced “k-o-r”, not “k-o-r-p-s,” try to remember this, Mr. President) at the annual Gridiron Dinner. And to top it all off, the crowning event in Barack Obama’s busy schedule — drum roll, please! — videotaping his NCAA tournament bracket picks. (Think about it: Obama discusses basketball with authority, which means that he must be spending a lot of time watching the games and listening to sports commentators. Exactly what he was elected for, wasn’t he?) While Rome burned, Nero fiddled. While the world burns, Obama ponders the outcome of a college basketball tournament.

Faced with this blatant display of indolence and indomitable refusal to fulfill the duties of his office, Obama’s supporters are puzzled: What happened to the giant who bestrode the world during the election campaign? Where have all the flowers gone? Something is definitely amiss. But what? Muses NYT putative conservative David Brooks, he of the creased pant leg fame, “All in all, President Obama is an astoundingly complicated person. During the 2008 presidential campaign, and during the first two years of his term, I would have said that his troubling flaw was hubris — his attempts to do everything at once. But he seems to have an amazing capacity to self-observe and adjust. Now I’d say his worrying flaw is passivity.” Maybe he is saving his extraordinary talents for a really monumental task deserving his undivided attention — perhaps making bracket picks come NBA playoff time?

The multiverse theory that postulates the existence of numerous parallel universes, each governed by its own laws of nature, is currently gaining traction in scientific circles. I have no idea if the theory is true in cosmogony, but in the socio-political realm the elites definitely exist in a universe separate from the rest of country, divorced from the unwashed masses and common sense. It is ruled by its own peculiar laws which its denizens are required to obey unquestioningly on pain of being cast into the outer darkness of fly-over America. In that universe, a reduction in the rate of growth of social spending, say, from nine to seven percent, is a “devastating cut”; a budget reduction of about five-thousandths of one percent is tantamount to the Apocalypse; increasing spending is a sure-fire way of shrinking the budget deficit; raising taxes is a recipe for prosperity; Sarah Palin is an idiot; Michelle Obama is the most beautiful woman with the most exquisite taste in clothes since Helen of Troy; and — the ultimate eternal verity — Barack Obama is a colossus of superhuman intellectual gifts and powers.

The smart set living in an echo-chamber that reinforces their conventional wisdom have eagerly embraced this article of faith because in their world to question Obama’s ability is to commit the deadly sin of racism. And don’t think they are cynics who merely parrot the party line and go along to get along. So deeply are they invested in the Obama myth that they summon all their intellectual resources to its defense. Utterly terrified of committing thought crime, they have internalized their beliefs and with religious fervor keep faith with their creed. To let any doubt creep into their minds is tantamount to aligning themselves with the “Obama-haters” — all those “yahoos” and “knuckle-draggers” of the far right. Their greatest fear is to break ranks with the true believers and invite ostracism — a prospect too horrible to behold.

And so they explain to one another that Obama’s defiant detachment must have some reason too complex for mere mortals to discern; his powerful mind is too intricate and resourceful for anyone to understand or pass judgment on his actions (or inaction, as the case may be). Thus one of the theories gaining favor in their circles: Obama is focused on lofty objectives way beyond the capacity of our meager intelligence to grasp; he sees the deeper truth; he soars to such heights that our earth-bound concerns dwindle into total insignificance.

Once upon a time there lived an emperor. One day two crafty weavers turned up at the palace and offered to make a new suit of clothes for the ruler — clothes so marvelous that they would be invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid or incompetent. And so when the emperor stepped out to show off his brand-new attire, the courtiers, fearful of being found out and ridiculed, would not admit to themselves the truth of what their eyes were telling them. Until an innocent child in the crowd of onlookers cried out, “He isn’t wearing anything at all!”, and the spell was broken.

Hans Christian Andersen did not indicate whether the weavers’ names were David Axelrod and David Plouffe, but the similarity is striking. The two Davids brilliantly succeeded in packaging and selling to the country an unknown tyro from Chicago without a past or any visible qualifications other than imposing looks, a resonant voice and an ability to use the teleprompter. Like the weavers in the great Danish writer’s fairy-tale, the Obama handlers insulated their candidate against criticism by preemptively warning that any doubt as to his fitness for office was proof positive of mean-spiritedness and racism. And the liberal crowd swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker.

The famous Occam’s razor principle states that the simplest explanation is the most plausible one. Applying it to dispel the fog of propaganda, it becomes glaringly obvious that Obama is an accidental president, a lazy and indecisive incompetent devoid of any ability or desire to perform the job to which he was elected by a gullible majority, who loves the perks but hates the duties of his office; who loves to play but hates to work. Have a good look at the man occupying the White House: what you see is what you get. The Emperor has no clothes.

HT: American Thinker

Meanwhile, for the Chinese and other fast-growing economies, it’s full speed ahead on new energy projects. Chinese oil companies are pursuing new oil and gas exploration on a global scale, even in the mainland U.S. They are buying up oil and gas leases in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America, including just offshore Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico.

But China is not limiting its options to petroleum. It is acquiring vast reserve of coal, importing U.S. coal that environmentalists have put off-limits to electric utilities in the United States and securing ownership of coal mines in Australia, Asia, and Latin America. The purchase of Felix Resources by China’s Yanzhou Coal in December 2009 was the largest coal acquisition in Australian history, but it was by no means the last. Asian buyers are now competing for another big prize: Whitehaven Coal. Soon, even if American policymakers were to wake up to the threat we face, there will be no more major coal properties available for purchase.

The situation with uranium supplies is equally dire. At present the U.S. is the largest nuclear energy producer in the world, but China is out to change that. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, China plans to build 60 large nuclear reactors by the end of this decade, and it is acquiring the uranium necessary to fuel these facilities along with its existing plants. Chinese state-owned companies are bidding on uranium-rich companies around the world, including Kalahari Minerals, owner of large uranium deposits in Namibia.

In response, the Obama administration has not approved a single one among the pending 21 applications for new nuclear facilities in the U.S. With no action on the part of regulators, American companies are loath to acquire rights to new supplies of uranium. They have been largely absent from bidding for the world’s remaining supplies.

This review is not intended as a criticism of China, which is simply pursuing the kind of coherent, long-range energy policy that is lacking at present in the U.S. China is acting in the rational self-interest of its people, and its people will reap the reward of this effort in the decades ahead.

Obama’s policy, on the other hand, is simply “none of the above.” America will also reap the rewards of its energy policy under Obama and Energy Secretary Chu. With no additional nuclear facilities under development, with the withering away of domestic coal-power production, and with no access to major new Alaskan and offshore oil supplies, America faces a future energy shock of unprecedented proportions. Once the effects of Obama’s restrictions on drilling begin to be felt, today’s gas prices are going to seem like a blue-light special.

The question is, why does Obama want to forestall access to so many of our energy resources just at the moment when gas prices are hitting $4 a gallon and experts are predicting they will go higher? Either the President is out of his mind, or he is intent on wrecking our future. Since spiraling gas prices are also going to hinder Obama’s re-election, it is a difficult question to answer. The truth may be that he just hasn’t thought about it. He’s too busy shooting hoops and hosting rappers like Jay-Z in the White House Situation Room.

Unless reversed by a conservative president and Congress following 2012, Obama’s failed energy policy will have devastating consequences. Americans will pay much higher prices for energy in the future, as high as $12 a gallon for gas and four times the current price of about 15 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. More important yet, high energy prices will sap economic growth, and slower growth will result in structurally high unemployment, declining living standards, and a weakening of our national defense. Maybe this is what Obama wants — I believe that it is — but it is not what most Americans hope to see.

Slow growth and a weakened military may not seem like such an awful fate to the fashionable idiots on the left. It is, in fact, exactly what they are seeking: an America brought to its knees, one weak little nation among many, no more powerful or influential than Bolivia or Peru. A nation that sits happily on the sidelines of history, content to consume its “fair share” of the earth’s resources and live at the average level of the world’s economy, somewhere between Nigeria and Moldova.

That is the happy future that Obama has in mind for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A pair of plastic sandals and a government-issued bike for transport, a bowl of rice for supper, a three-month wait for a visit to the physician’s assistant, and a hundred-square-foot apartment with a wall screen permanently tuned to MSNBC.

There are some Americans who are born communists — those who fancy the Mao suit, the masochistic fall-into-line mentality, the fondness for self-abasement and diminishment. These natural-born comrades, eager to hand over their liberties to some vicious and inscrutable dictator, must like what they see in Obama. The rest of us will continue fighting to preserve our liberties.

HT: American Thinker

After months of refusing to cut any spending, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) finally came out with a Democratic offer to cut spending for this current fiscal year by a mere $4.7 billion. The budget deficit for the current fiscal year is projected to be $1.6 trillion. So, the Senate Democrats’ spending cuts would lower the federal deficit by a mere .004%.

“At a time when Washington is borrowing about $4 billion a day, Democratic leaders want to cut about four and a half billion in government spending for the rest of the fiscal year and then call it a day,” said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.).

When the Democrats’ spending proposal came to the floor for a vote last week, Reid could not even keep his own Democrats on board because the spending cuts were so insignificant. When the Democratic alternative spending bill came to a vote in the Senate, 11 Democrats voted against it. The final vote was 42-58.

In contrast, the Republican House-passed Continuing Resolution (CR) which cuts government spending this year by $61 billion got more votes (44-56), but did not meet the 60-vote threshold needed to pass. McConnell held together all his Republicans for the CR (H.R. 1), except three who wanted even deeper cuts, Jim DeMint (S.C.) and freshmen Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.). So all of the Republicans in the Senate and 11 of the Democrats want to cut government spending this year, while Reid and other Democratic leaders fight to keep almost all the taxpayers’ money in Washington.

The Democratic House and Senate last year did not pass a budget or any of the appropriations bills. To keep the government from shutting down, McConnell and Obama negotiated a three-month CR in December. On February 19, the House Republicans passed a CR (H.R. 1) that cut $61 billion in government spending for the current fiscal year, which goes through September 30.

Reid at first refused to take up the House CR, calling the cuts “draconian,” and Obama said that he would veto the bill if it passed the Senate. So to keep the government funded after March 4, Congress had to pass a short-term CR. However, Boehner said that any short-term CR to keep the government funded while budget negotiations continued would have to include cuts in spending. Thus, the House passed a two-week CR last week that cuts spending by $4 billion and expires March 18.

While the Senate Democrats blocked the House CR, the House Democrats were claiming that they had already compromised on spending cuts. Pelosi said last week that the House Democrats “have, I repeat, have cut $41 billion from President Obama’s budget already.”

“We’ve come up more than halfway to meet the Republican proposals, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D.-Md.) told reporters this week.

But, the Democratic leaders’ saying that they had already cut spending is merely a reference to the December CR which was $41 billion less than Obama’s proposed budget, which was never enacted. So the House Democrats are not willing to cut a single penny from current spending, but claiming that they have already come “halfway”.

To be fair, the Democrats learned how to claim bigger spending-cut numbers from the example set by the House Republicans. When Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) first announced the CR in early February, he said that it met the Republicans’ “Pledge To America” by cutting spending back to 2008 levels and saving $100 billion from the President’s budget. But when the actual numbers were released, it was clear that Ryan’s CR did not bring spending back to 2008 levels and cut only $32 billion from current 2010 levels.

The House Republican leadership spent days trying to spin reporters by saying that the Pledge to cut $100 billion was always in reference to Obama’s proposed budget and was for a calendar year. But it was the backlash from the freshmen and the conservative wing that forced Speaker of the House John Boehner (R.-Ohio) to ask the Appropriations Committee to cut more discretionary spending. By the time the CR came to the floor for a vote, the Republicans had cut another $29 billion from this year’s spending.

So, the Democrats’ claim that their $41 billion is halfway to $100 billion means that both sides are citing non-existent cuts to hypothetical spending levels. Bottom line: Both sides are cooking the books to make their political points and improve their image with the public.

While the Senate debated the House spending bill last week, President Obama put out his second veto threat. The White House said that Obama would veto H.R. 1 if it passed the Senate because “the unbalanced bill would undermine the nation’s economic recovery and its ability to succeed in a complex global environment.”

Obama has now put out two veto threats, but has not participated at all in the negotiations with Congress on the budget.
“Where is the President?” asked an outraged Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R.-Va.). “We continue to hear from him and the White House that, ‘We are going to meet you halfway.’ Well, where is the President?”

Instead, Obama named Vice President Joe Biden as his “chief negotiator” with congressional leaders on the CR. But, Biden left the country before the Senate vote to travel to went to Finland, Russia and Moldova.

“The Vice President is the main negotiator; the Vice President is not even in the country today. We have less than a week and a half to go. You ask the press secretary at the White House, ‘Well who’s the lead negotiator with the Vice President gone?’ ‘Can’t tell you that.”” said Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R.-Calif.) last Wednesday.

Biden’s only involvement with the CR was to make phone calls to Boehner and McConnell. He tried calling Reid but they did not connect (There is more than one phone line on Air Force 2. I know; I’ve flown on it many times.)

So what are the next steps?

The House will vote on Tuesday on a three-week CR that will cut an additional $6 billion in spending. The House Republicans are putting the CR out a week earlier than the deadline in order to disarm the Democrats from making accusations of shutting down the government. The Senate and President are expected to go along with the new CR.

For the negotiations on the long-term CR to occur, Republicans insist that the Democrats have to come up with real spending cuts in order for them to negotiate down from the $61 billion level. But so far, the only offer on the table is the $61 billion from the House CR, which failed to pass the Senate last week.

“Where is the Senate Democrat plan? I’m not going to sit up here and negotiate with myself!” an indignant Boehner said last Thursday.

The negotiations between the House Republicans and Senate Democrats will have to resume, but the resolution and the final level of spending cuts is still unpredictable.

HT: Human Events

How delicious is irony, how fickle fate?

Just a little more than two years ago, liberals were ecstatic about Barack Obama’s election and Democrats’ control of Congress. Liberal pundits were all atwitter about the brand new Democratic Era that voters had ushered in. America would finally become what America should have been years ago: a European-style social democracy.

Boy, did Democrats misread their mandate! With very little hindsight needed, it’s apparent to all but ideologically-blinkered liberals that the Democrats’ gross overreach isn’t what voters wanted or expected. Voters wanted a redo of the Clinton years. Instead, in the person of Barack Obama, voters got an amalgam of FDR and LBJ with a dash of Neville Chamberlin thrown in.

But here’s the real kicker. Two years of Obama-Reid-Pelosi overreach and excesses may have been the table-setter for the real revolution now unfolding. Voters and taxpayers first needed to see the irresponsibility and recklessness of unalloyed liberalism to appreciate that conservative government is far superior. Thank you, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.

Of course, the real revolution began last year with the 2010 midterm elections. Yes, the GOP made the largest gains in U.S. House seats since 1948. But the underappreciated story is that the GOP racked up huge gains in state legislative contests, and further down ballot, Republicans swept plenty of local offices. State legislatures control congressional redistricting. Republicans now dominate enough key statehouses to lock-in GOP congressional electoral advantages for a decade.

Had voters limited their ballots to throwing out the rascals in Congress, a fair argument could be made that 2010 was just a protest vote — an attempt by voters to shake up the Democrats. But when voters drill down to change party control of legislatures, city halls, and county commissions, you can bet that they’re thoroughly repudiating the party in power. The 2010 repudiation of Democrats was a clear expression of what voters did and didn’t want from government.

Move now to the present time. Republicans are on the march in Congress. Late last week, House Republicans passed a budget bill containing $61 billion in cuts. It’s not the $100 billion that conservatives aimed for, but it’s substantial and can be considered a down payment. The House Republican proposal now goes to the Senate. The budget process wrangling is just in its first phase. Moving forward, the GOP will have multiple opportunities to push more cuts.

And look what else House Republicans are doing. They’re using the budget process to hamstring Obamacare by denying it funding. Shutting down and then nixing ObamaCare would be an historic victory in the fight to end liberalism’s nearly hundred-year dominance; it would be one of those critical turning points in history — like Vicksburg and Gettysburg — a momentum shifter that leads to other key victories, such as entitlements reform.

Also, Indiana Republican Mike Pence offered and passed an amendment cutting funding for the odious abortion mill called Planned Parenthood. Another amendment, offered by Oregon Republican Greg Walden, that passed, chokes off funds for the Federal Communications Commission’s net-neutrality gambit. Net -neutrality would concentrate more power in the FCC’s hands and stymie free speech across the internet. Net-neutrality could well have been made in China.

Of course, the revolution just beginning isn’t confined to the Halls of Congress. Chris Christie, New Jersey’s intrepid Republican governor, fired the first shots last year in the burgeoning struggle to bring sanity back to state affairs. Christie’s efforts aren’t limited to balancing state budgets and reining in taxes, important as those things are. Christie is working to limit government and expand the playing field for the private sector. As we’re seeing, government without proper limits is a ruinous beast. California is a prime example.

Now newly elected Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is making headlines because he dares to say that his state is broke and that the public employees’ gravy train needs to end. Governor Walker wants to end collective bargaining for public employees, excepting police and firefighters, on the simple, common sense premise that employees shouldn’t be negotiating the hours they work, among other things.

In Ohio, Governor John Kasich is gearing up to slash budgets, rollback taxes, cut regulations, and confront the Buckeye State’s public employee unions. There’ll be fireworks aplenty in Columbus.

Thomas Jefferson is being proven right again. The states are the laboratories of democracy. Christie, Kasich, and Walker are seeking to demonstrate that limited, financially responsible government is best for economic and societal health. If successful — and we should all have high confidence that these governors will succeed — the lessons will not be lost on voters and politicians in other states. Revolutions are like that; it takes just a few courageous leaders to embolden others and for revolutions to spread.

A marvelous, if unintended, consequence of this burgeoning conservative revolution is what it’s doing to liberalism. The budding conservative revolution is starting to place strains on liberalism; beginning to make liberals and their allies fight defensive battles in multiple — and multiplying — places. Call this a modified Cloward-Piven — or Cloward-Piven turned on its masters.

Challenging liberal governance, and pressing limited government reforms, will help bring down liberalism across the nation. And that should be an indisputable aim of the new conservative revolution. Liberalism became a pox on the nation years ago. Marginalizing liberalism would be an incomparable service to generations to come — and to those kids being lied to now by too many Wisconsin teachers.

“Change We Can Believe In.” Mr. Obama’s slogan always had a nice ring to it, but it was misapplied and a little ahead of its time. With the conservative revolution, change we can really believe in has arrived. How’s that for rich irony?

HT: American Thinker

After months of “change,” Americans have had enough. An Aug. 8 Rasmussen poll of likely voters shows only 30 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction. Two-thirds (65 percent) think America is on the wrong track.

The same overwhelming majority tell Rasmussen they want smaller government – one that does less, costs less and operates far more efficiently.

Progressives scoff, asserting that Americans want Big Government – they just don’t want to pay for it. Besides, they argue, there are no other options: Conservatives have no ideas on how to address our problems.

They’re mistaken. The proof is found in “Solutions for America,” a comprehensive 54-page guide from The Heritage Foundation that presents more than 120 conservative policy prescriptions to get our nation back on the right track. Some of the recommendations are groundbreaking. Others are familiar. All have one thing in common: They would return power to the people. And, collectively, they will transform America.

For example, “Solutions for America” calls for ending the era of open-ended entitlements. Spending on the Big Three entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – is on auto-pilot, consuming an ever-increasing share of GDP without even a vote in Congress. Lawmakers need to bring these programs into the budgetary process, establishing firm, five-year budgets and making sure that those needing help the most get it.

We should raise the Social Security retirement age, and encourage people to work longer by eliminating payroll taxes for those over retirement age. We should let needy families choose how to spend their share of Medicaid dollars, allowing them to purchase higher quality private insurance. And when entitlement spending exceeds congressionally approved levels, automatic triggers should keep costs in line.

We must cap welfare spending, which now, across all levels of government, approaches $1 trillion. Congress should consider all 71 means-tested welfare programs as a whole, eliminating duplicative programs and capping annual increases in welfare spending at the rate of inflation.

Moreover, lawmakers should break the culture of dependency by making sure that able-bodied welfare recipients give something in return for their benefits. In some areas, this will mean strengthening work requirements. In others, it may involve treating some benefits as loans to be repaid.

Spending overall also needs to be restrained. “Solutions” recommends a mechanism to force Congress to live within a reasonable budget: a binding cap that limits future year-to-year growth in federal spending to inflation plus population growth. The general goal should be to lower spending to the historic norm of no more than 20 percent of GDP.

Other common-sense policy proposals in “Solutions” include:

– Aligning the top tax rate on corporate earnings with those of our 30 largest trading partners, so we can better compete for business globally.

– Letting states opt out of inflexible, D.C.-based programs, so they can resume their traditional leadership roles and freely pursue innovative approaches in areas such as education and transportation.

– Ending corporate welfare and earmarks.

– Returning to a foreign policy of “peace through strength” to deal with the growing threat of nuclear proliferation and well as the dangers posed by global terrorism and hostile conventional forces.

At a recent fundraiser, President Obama asserted: “The other side isn’t offering anything new.” As if centralized government based on the principles of control, spending, debt and redistribution of wealth is new. It isn’t. It’s been tried worldwide and has consistently failed.

Yet the calls for lavish spending continue – the only answer we get from the current leadership. Conservative answers start from a very different place. The counterpoint to thoughtless and expensive government programs is not new thoughtless and expensive government programs. The counterpoint is real reform.

The principles that our nation was founded upon aren’t ideas to be discarded. They’re exceptional goals to be rediscovered. Real government reform is itself an untested idea. That’s what conservatives offer. It’s an idea whose time has come.

HT: CNSnews

President Obama called the Democrats’ November 2 loss of sixty-one House seats a “shellacking.” Yet in a day-after press conference, Obama sported a self-absorbed manner, contrived reflection, and a basic misread of the American people. In a “60 Minutes” interview aired four days later, he denied that voters had repudiated his agenda. The president doesn’t understand why a center-right nation would reject a left-wing Obama. This man will not “move to the center.”

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. In early 2008, Senator Obama accused businesses of having cultures “rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed.” Only ten months shy of establishing a federal regime rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and greed, the senator also warned that America’s “real problem is … that the corporation you work for will ship [your job] overseas for nothing more than a profit.”

Obama’s implicit suggestion that companies should bleed dollars to keep people employed revealed his blindness to economic reality. The practice of demonizing capitalists and the free market has become an Obama favorite. So goes the “progressive” mentality. So goes Barack Obama.

Obama destroys. Wearing the cape of savior, he destroys the resolve of people seeking to be saved. Abusing the office of president, Obama destroys American prosperity. He genuinely believes that government creates wealth. But Obama’s policies and pontifications scare the hell out of the machine that creates all wealth: private enterprise.

The president makes a show of caring about private enterprise, about people. But he is in love with big government, with ideas. Almighty central planning is progressivism’s dearest idea. Barack Obama’s idea, too. Obama clings to the notion that government legislates progress. He cannot see that society progresses when doers do profitable things that improve people’s lives, an endeavor called “business.” Remove the profit motive, and action fades. Without action, no business. Without business, no progress. Yet Obama doesn’t get it. Our president is an ideologue.

Since 1900, in America as in Europe, progressive ideologues like Obama have dominated a ruling class that focuses government on one overarching pursuit: political patronage. Today, snowballing organizations like George Soros’s Open Society Institute and Tides Foundation, “green” advocacy groups; climate alarmists; social, economic, and environmental justice zealots; multiculturalism preachers; and victimhood-mongers of all kinds vie for government backing to push agendas.

In Bought and Paid For, Charlie Gasparino shows how the chummiest kowtowers to Obama’s favor, Wall Street “fat cats,” push agendas of personal profit. The president’s rhetoric and policies ooze contempt for the general idea of business, but business writ large across Lower Manhattan draws only pseudo-threats that camouflage friendly policies. The double standard subjects honest, traditional, small-business entrepreneurs to a baked-in disadvantage: omission from Obama’s corporatist gift list.

Corporatism does create prosperity, but mainly for businesses that play the game. Widespread prosperity arises when anyone with a legal business idea gets an unimpeded shot at trying out that idea in the marketplace without playing games. Entrepreneurs must be free to direct talent and money into products and services that people want.

Today’s business leaders instead navigate a maze of flagrant political patronage tailored to accommodate a chosen few. Among the few are the Wall Street fat cats, as well as “green” and “alternative energy” interests. EPA overregulation will, for instance, force consumers to buy green electricity at jacked-up prices and pay mark-ups on anything that requires electricity to produce — in other words, everything.

Barack Obama presides over this abuse while hyping the need for vision, the need to help fellow Americans. The opposite side of the presidential mouth vilifies visionary people whose business revenues do help Americans by providing jobs. Obama paints these traditional business people as coldhearted, bigoted, nature-hating Ebenezer Scrooges. What else could traditionalists be? Anyone opposing the visionary, compassionate, planet-saving Obama is obviously a Neanderthal.

The president locks out Neanderthals. The presidential network accommodates only enlightened beings who push, Kool-Aid drinkers who accept, and savvy partners who profit from fundamental transformation. It will be no surprise when Obama keeps the unenlightened Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, on the fringes of the network. Barack Obama will tolerate nothing resembling Republican accomplishments over the next two years.

Neither will the president mothball his anti-business ideology. The stunting economic effects will be insidious. Markets create maximum wealth when businesspeople move about freely, developing and ending relationships across various social networks. In those networks lie common interests, and in the interests, needs. When entrepreneurs decide to fulfill the needs, businesses are born. Entrepreneurs benefit. Networks benefit. Other entrepreneurs replicate the process. Society thrives. Prosperity grows.

Barack Obama abhors this natural order.

Obama the progressive views himself as a socioeconomic engineer. Although the free market’s health depends on government respecting citizens’ right to freely and randomly associate with each other, our control-obsessed president cannot stand for something so serendipitous derailing his brilliantly planned economy. Progressives know better. Progressives must dictate. The free market’s smooth functioning also depends on respect for the rule of law. But Obama displays staggering disregard for the law. The president has anointed dozens of policy-making “czars” accountable only to him. Halting America’s fundamental transformation now hinges on the GOP finding ways to stop vast amounts of czar-initiated backdoor regulation.

If Barack Obama cares about being reelected, he might try something new: admitting his faults. The president might reflect on how he contributed to two years of economic misery, caused the electoral slaughter of his political party, and lost the trust of Americans, who said, “No, no, no!” as he kept saying, “Yes we can!” He might try adopting the proposals of Capitol Hill conservatives and setting America’s businesses free. The private sector will produce an economic recovery for which ideologue Obama would take credit. The president’s drool-soaked media toadies would eagerly sell the claim.

But Obama is an ideologue — and a man addicted to demonizing his opponents. So the president will play ugly games with a recharged GOP. He will agree to extend the Bush tax cuts. But the left-winger will cling to left-wing dogma and choose ever sneakier routes that will burden American business. The ideologue and his czars and agency bosses will try to circumvent Congress and the Constitution to bring about state-controlled capitalism.

God give the Republicans the courage to rediscover integrity and sane economic principle. For the sake of Americans living today and Americans not yet born, may voters continue to awaken between now and November 2012 and finish the purge that was started in November 2010.

HT: American Thinker

Dennis Prager

Next Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010 is not Election Day. It is Referendum Day.

It may be commonplace for commentators to announce that every election is “the most important election in our lifetime” or something analogous. But having never said that of a presidential election, let alone an off-year election, this commentator cannot be accused of crying wolf when I say that this off-year election is not simply the most important of my lifetime. It is the most important since the Civil War.

The reason is that unlike all previous elections, this one is actually a referendum on the direction of the United States of America.

If the Democrats win:

– The American people have announced, consciously or not, that they support the Democratic Party’s “fundamental transformation” — those were President Obama’s words when he campaigned, and he has lived up to them — of America from a liberty-based state of limited government into an equality-based welfare state with an ever-expanding government.

– America will change from a country that emphasizes producing wealth to a country that emphasizes redistribution of wealth.

The left has never been primarily interested in creating wealth. Its primary goal always and everywhere has been to redistribute it. That so many businessmen and much of Wall Street are only now awakening to this fact is only a testament to the staggering lack of wisdom in big business.

– America will produce increasingly narcissistic citizens.

For proof, just look at the virtual shutdown of much of France and the ubiquitous rioting of vast numbers of its citizens over a tiny change in its welfare state — raising the age of retirement from 60 to 62. The idea that one will work two more years before receiving benefits until death so offends vast numbers of French — including young people who have every reason to believe they will live until the age of 100 — that they are fighting it as if their very lives were in jeopardy. That is the self-centeredness that all welfare states engender in their citizens.

– America will further reinforce the conviction that minorities are victims — who must be protected from their fellow Americans by the state.

Latinos, blacks, Muslims, gays and vast numbers of women have been told by the left and its political party that they are all persecuted by a country that is SIXHIRB — Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist and Bigoted. That America is the least SIXHIRB country in the world is a fact that has been all but drowned out by the left-wing domination of television and print news media, all the entertainment media, and the high schools and universities.

– America will continue to undermine its unique ability to Americanize people of all ethnic, national, racial, and religious backgrounds.

With a Democratic victory the country’s very motto — E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many One” — will continue to erode as ethnic and racial identities rather one American identity are increasingly celebrated. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel has just announced that Germany’s experiment with multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” but the left and its political party, the Democrats, have redoubled their efforts to supplant E Pluribus Unum with multiculturalism.

– America will continue its economic slide.

With a Democratic victory, unsustainable debts will mount, wealth-producing companies will continue to flee from higher taxes and more regulations, energy use will be taxed in the name of environmentalist utopianism, and the government will continue to print dollars.

– America will become increasingly secular.

With a Democratic victory, the left’s goal of rendering America’s other motto, “In God We Trust,” an anachronism will come closer to fruition. Leftism is a jealous god. As in Western Europe, the Judeo-Christian roots of this country are ceasing to play the indispensible moral role they have played since before 1776.

And what would constitute a Democrat victory next Tuesday? Anything other than a Republican landslide. Any other result will be interpreted by the media and by the Democrats as solely a result of the economic recession and as the normal losses of the dominant party in off-year elections.

In other words, the only way to ensure that the electoral results are seen as a repudiation of the growth of the state and the other Democrat and leftist goals is through an enormous Republican victory.

Only then will America understand that this election was not first about jobs. It was above all about America.

HT: DennisPrager.com

It is Europe’s autumn of discontent. All across the continent, people are taking to the streets to protest the austerity measures of their governments. The governments have to cut for a simple reason: They are broke. They no longer have the money to sponsor the kind of padded lifestyles to which their citizens have grown accustomed. This in turn makes the citizens angry — so much so that they are willing to turn their countries upside-down in order to obtain benefits their governments simply cannot provide.

In France, where the deeply unpopular President Sarkozy is trying to raise the retirement age of 60, things have turned decidedly unpretty. Across the country, cars are getting burned, shop windows are getting smashed, garbage is left uncollected, roads are being blocked, and people are getting beaten up. Nearly one fourth of France’s twelve thousand-plus gasoline stations are suffering shortages. Even secondary schools are being blocked and disrupted.

Across the border in Belgium, a rail workers’ strike halted rail transport across the country. Only in the northern region of Flanders — which is the less socialistic part of Belgium — were some trains running intermittently last week. According to Agence France-Presse, “the strike triggered massive traffic jams on Belgian roads and also disrupted the services of the Eurostar train line which links London, Paris and Brussels.”

Late last month, a strike in Spain shut down much of the country’s industry and paralyzed transportation services. As many as 70 percent of Spain’s workforce walked off their jobs. “The strike has been an undoubted success,” gloated a union leader.

Greece now seems to be in a perpetual state of unrest and protest. Two weeks ago, protesters — mostly government workers — besieged and then occupied parts of the ancient Acropolis. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, rail workers and students marched on the Greek parliament. Even though it is bankrupt and dysfunctional, the Greek government still managed to rally the riot police to beat up on the state’s hapless wards.

The Frenchmen’s sense entitlement to Big Brother’s dough is truly staggering. It apparently makes itself felt early in life, as evidenced by Laura Tanniou, a 22-year-old student, who probably spoke for many in her generation when she said, “We may be only students now, but we still want to make the most of our retirement.” What she actually meant by the word “retirement” was state-provided retirement.

In the past, students used to dream about how they would become rich and make it big through their talents and efforts. But now, under the welfare state, they are fantasizing about how they will retire on generous government pensions. In light of the young lady’s statement, the expression “forward-looking young people” gains an entirely new meaning.

While the youth of France is dreaming about easy retirement, some of their mature compatriots think that work may pose a danger to health. Véro Du Cheyron, 51-year-old social worker, said this to a reporter: “They say that people are living longer so they have to work longer, but they don’t say anything about the health problems that come by doing that.”

This is a strange claim, especially when coming from France, where people are not known to overextend themselves during their working years. By law, they enjoy a 35-hour working week, which they tackle, for the most part, at a less-than-breakneck pace. Their blasé attitude toward work is not surprising, given that more than half of Frenchmen work either directly for government or in government-related jobs. Yet there are people in France who think that adding two more years of this to a person’s work-life could endanger their health.

What we see happening in France and across Europe are the devastating effects of the welfare state. We see a citizenry whose work ethic, morals, power of reason, and grasp on reality have been grievously damaged. They balk at hard work, yet they want to enjoy lives of plenty and ease. Their governments are bankrupt, but they still keep demanding benefits that are impossible to deliver. And while they refuse to engage in hard labor themselves, they see nothing wrong with living at someone else’s expense.

The welfare state — once the pride and glory of European democracies — has become a curse. This sad situation should have not come as a surprise. The outcome was predictable, given what we know about human nature and the workings of government. More than two hundred years ago, John Adams warned of welfarism’s pernicious effects:

Like a cancer; it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole of society.

Adams’ words describe the disposition of the contemporary western welfare state almost to a T. One could only perhaps add “widespread amentia” to Adam’s list of afflictions.

If they were clear-thinking, the Europeans would protest against the criminal waste and recklessness of their governments and demand that they shape up. They would call for the resignation and prosecution of those politicians responsible for their bankruptcy. They would insist that the fiscal house be put in order. But they never do that. On the contrary, they march and demand even more spending. Instead of demonstrating against those who brought on their fiscal ruin, they protest those who try to do something about it.

In one respect, America is still very different from Europe. It is the only Western country where people march against the bankrupting policies of their government. We have seen this in numerous Tea Party rallies across the land. It is encouraging to see this reaction, especially since such thinking is completely alien to most people in the rest of the developed world.

But even in America, welfarism has exerted its devastating effects. Even though many in this country are angry about our fiscal plight, they are unwilling to support the kind of measures necessary to bring about remedy. Anyone who looks at the budget and long-term spending trends will quickly realize that it is entitlements that account for the bulk of the federal fiscal burden. The much-talked-about national debt — large though it is — represents only a small portion of the government’s overall obligations. To avoid the fiscal train wreck that lies ahead, drastic cuts will have to be made in entitlement programs. But this is precisely what the vast majority of the American people — including those who are upset about our national bankruptcy — refuse to accept.

We saw a striking demonstration of this last week when Carly Fiorina, a California Senate candidate, appeared on “Fox News Sunday.” One of the themes of Fiorina’s campaign has been reinstating financial sanity in Washington, D.C. — so much so that she recently even issued a budget plan intended to bolster her fiscal hawk credentials. But when asked by the host to name a single entitlement benefit she would cut or reduce, she refused to answer. When pressed on the point, she accused her interlocutor of “asking a typical political question.”

Some would say that Fiorina’s evasiveness is indicative of a lack of political will to make the hard choices. But this is not the case. Fiorina’s attitude is, in fact, reflective of a lack of popular will. Had she said that she would cut entitlements, her chances of getting elected would have effectively dropped to zero.

Nor is Fiorina’s quandary peculiar to left-leaning California. As far as this writer is aware, no Tea Party candidate for federal office has publicly advocated deep cuts in entitlement programs. In fact, according to research by James Ostrowski, not one Tea Party-favored senatorial candidate is calling for significant reductions in even the over-bloated federal agencies. To say, as Fiorina did, that she plans to cut waste will simply not do. For one thing, the savings from what is officially termed waste would be too small to make any real difference. But the larger point is that most federal spending is a waste in the first place, not to mention the fact that it is also unconstitutional.

What the concerned Americans need to realize is that we cannot have it both ways: We cannot gripe about the size of the federal cake while munching on it all the while. Until we resolve this contradiction in our hearts and minds, we cannot be fiscally cured.

HT: American Thinker

That’s the personal catechism of Obama and his gang. Or, to put it more honestly, “Your property is theft. My property is untouchable.”

Gimme that Air Force One. Gimme that trillion-dollar slush fund. Gimme that vacation in Spain at taxpayer expense. It’s mine! The Clintons even took the White House silverware, remember?

Some people have a monstrous appetite for power and privilege, but they always claim to do what they do from compassion for the little people. Kim Jong-Il in North Korea is starving his people from love of the people. He’s got a Stalinist propaganda apparatus and real concentration camps to make sure that the people actually go along with that. North Korea has the only permanent diet plan in the world that actually works. Has anybody told Michelle?

But forget Stalinism. In the European Union, the power class are so locked in that they don’t bother with real elections anymore. The “elected” EU Parliament makes no real laws, and the real lawmakers are not elected. It’s a big socialist front, a bureaucratic coup d’état.

It was Newsweek magazine that recently proclaimed, “We Are All Socialists Now.” The readers didn’t seem to go for that, actually, and Newsweek has just been sold for $1.00.

Which kind of tells the story.

Newsweek elevated Evan Thomas to its top ranks. Mr. Thomas is the grandson of Norman Thomas, the longtime capo di capi of the Democratic Socialists of America. The acorn has not fallen far from the oak, either. Which means that the WaPoCo drove Newsweek into the ground by appointing a socialist to run it — on the assumption, I suppose, that Americans could be forced to love being robbed of the fruits of their labor. What Newsweek meant by We Are All Socialists Now was that Obama got elected, and we’re takin’ over.

Evan Thomas knew perfectly well who Obama was. But he forgot to tell his readers before the election. Then he celebrated with his headline We Are All Socialists Now! and his readers said, Whatever, baby!

Now Newsweek is a nonprofit, albeit involuntarily.

Which is fine, as long as Newsweek can get enough leftist billionaires to pay the high salaries its propaganda artists demand. Or maybe Obama will find a few billion bucks for those obedient JournoLists? You can bet they are trying to figure out how. They have to, because without their propaganda apparatus, they are gone.

Ever since that triumphalist Newsweek headline, the Democrats have been trying to boogie away from self-proclaimed socialism, but they can’t. Reality gets in the way.

Affirmative action is racial socialism. ObamaCare is the worst kind of medical socialism. One point three trillion additional dollars of deficit spending over one year is socialist socialism. If it smells like it, by golly, it probably is.

Newsweek is all but out of business, but Obama and his gang believe that ordinary people still shouldn’t be allowed to decide where their money goes. Which is why you pay for PBS, NPR, and the National Endowment for Offending All Religions Except Islam. It is America’s official leftist Ministry of Propaganda, something any self-respecting tyranny has had for the last six thousand years, ever since the imperial powers of Sumer, Egypt, and Beijing.

Egypt had its priesthood to propagandize for the Pharaohs and to all make the lowly slaves worship the State. The Left calls itself Progressive, but it’s just a throwback to ancient times. The Left is as Retro as Retro gets.

So the question of theft and property turns out to be — surprise, surprise! — a question of Us versus Them. Deep in his bones, Obama knows with Pharaoh-like certainty that it’s Us, the victim groups from Harvard Law, who deserve all the goodies they can extort; which is what the IRS does, after all.

Still, a lot of Americans think they own the fruits of their labor.

Property is theft.

Socialism is theft.

Who wins that one?

That’s the struggle today. The next few elections will decide. That means you, buster! Stay home come election time, and Obama wins. Forever.

HT: American Thinker

There are among the population of the country Barack Obama has been chosen to lead those who have experienced firsthand the iron fist of a dictatorial government and who have survived the bloodshed that resulted. Tens of millions died during the past century under dictators. Deep within their psyche, these survivors are extraordinarily attuned to those factors that gave rise to the devastation when dictators have their way.

They know that the first step along this path is the emergence of a leader willing to do or say anything to promote a destructive and failed political philosophy and to achieve power by manipulating the emotions, fears, and prejudices of the people. But above all, they are mindful that only by exposing those who are determined to undermine their society, without hesitation or fear, can their nation be saved.

Therefore, on behalf of those of us who have live through the worst of times, and based upon the president’s words and deeds, it must be stated that Mr. Obama is a liar and a demagogue.

This deception began during the presidential campaign. Falling sway to soothing rhetoric and a deliberately fraudulent campaign to promote moderate positions on the economy and government, many citizens in 2008 voted for Senator Obama. Further, they hoped that by electing a man of African descent, the long national nightmare of slavery and the long civil rights struggle would at last be relegated to the pages of history. Capitalizing on that hope, Mr. Obama campaigned on the theme that as a political moderate, he would bring all Americans together and end the divisive politics of the past, as well as control the scope and size of government.

In the intervening two years since the election, the president, his underlings in the administration, and the sycophantic members of Congress have repeatedly invoked the checkered past of this country in regard to civil rights and never missed an opportunity to remind the people of Mr. Obama skin color. This has been done in a willful effort to capitalize on so-called white guilt, thus keeping alive the tensions in the black community and muzzling dissent, while enacting radical policies anathema to the overwhelming majority of the American people.

There has been no compunction in exploiting race or racial incidents, such as Professor Gates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Department of Justice and the Black Panthers, or the references to slavery in recent speeches by the president, to sow dissent among the populace. Given numerous opportunities to denounce racial demagoguery by his supporters or the media, the president has chosen to remain silent, thus giving his tacit approval to the onslaught of racial divisiveness and manipulation.

Employing the crassest of political ploys, Mr. Obama has, with forethought, sought to exploit the issue of illegal immigration by making it a matter of race and not law. His opposition to the Arizona immigration law and the false and overheated rhetoric used by both him and his associates constituted a deliberate attempt to disseminate fear and loathing toward fellow citizens by the Hispanic population in order to capture Hispanic votes and ensure Obama’s and his party’s radical wing’s continued and expanded hold on power.

In a time of recession and apprehension about the future economic well-being of the country, President Obama has exploited one of the oldest of man’s failings: envy towards those perceived to have more. Whether it is allusions to “the fat cats” in corporate America or snide references to millionaires or the implication that all of the average citizen’s problems can be solved by taking away money from the rich (who supposedly achieved their wealth on the backs of the poor), it is an age-old tactic geared to distract the populace by inciting anger against their fellow citizens and to present the government as the final arbiter of “fairness,” which results in the massive expansion of governmental dominance.

In furtherance of these aims, the lies and misrepresentations by Barack Obama and his administration are legion. But none are as egregious as those made in order to pass the Health Care Reform Act. Among the lies were assurances that premiums would not rise, Medicare would not be cut, everyone would be able to keep his or her current doctor and insurance, abortion would not be funded, and national medical costs would be reduced. All were total fabrications used to pass the most insidious attack on personal freedom in the history of the country.

It is of no difference who may have written the bill or what it may have contained within its 2,400 pages or whether Barack Obama or the members of Congress had read it. These false claims by the president would still have been made, as his only concern was to take away liberty from the people and vest it in himself and the government.

No president of the United States, or leader of any other country, would have made his primary foreign policy to go about the world apologizing and denigrating his nation, thus mocking the enormous sacrifices generations of Americans have made to save countless millions of people over the past century. Barack Obama, in a grandiose display of narcissism, did so only as a means of ingratiating himself to others and elevating his stature as a world figure.

By his rhetoric and strategy, Mr. Obama has sunk to the same level as numerous demagogues over the past 150 years who employed these same tactics as a means of achieving personal and centralized power.

The United States is on the precipice of failure. It may follow the well-worn path taken by so many great powers over the centuries and become an entry in the list of the rise and fall of great nations. This country cannot sit idly by and allow a president (or any other national leader) whose guiding personal philosophy is “the end justifies the means” and is thus devoid of honor and integrity, to go unchallenged by being reluctant to confront his words and deeds.

The media, politicians, and general citizenry must not be intimidated by Mr. Obama’s skin color or the pall of “political correctness.” They must face the reality of who the president is and his radical objectives. Too much hangs in the balance not to speak out forcefully and without apprehension, even after the midterm election, regardless of the outcome, and not to trust or believe whatever the president may do or say in the future. After all, he has squandered all credibility by his actions to date.

HT: American Thinker

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Geithner, erstwhile cheerleader for the Obama economic team, announces that unemployment rates could rise “for a couple of months.” “Of course we want to do what we can,” says Geithner, but what we’re doing is just not working.

Still, “large parts of the private sector continue to strengthen,” Geithner wrote in the New York Times on August 3. Maybe Geithner wasn’t looking at the same data as the Federal Reserve, which one week later reported that the economy was weakening. Not only that, but the Fed backed up its opinion with a commitment to new monetary stimulus. Come to think of it, Geithner’s boss was not hesitant to sign a $26-billion stimulus bill designed to bail out teachers’ unions and state Medicaid programs. If Geithner is so sure the economy is expanding, why is he supporting another stimulus bill?

The truth is that Geithner knows, as does every reputable economist out there, that the U.S. economy is not recovering as it should following the severe recession of 2008-2009. The Obama economic policies are just not working, and no one in the administration seems to have a clue about what to do.

As for Geithner, he thinks that Americans haven’t been taxed enough. In an August 4 speech, Geithner suggested that the tax cuts that began during the Reagan administration and continued through the presidency of George W. Bush actually slowed the growth of the economy. Geithner is perhaps the only economist in the universe to believe that employment rates did not increase during the period from 1983 to 2008, following reductions in marginal rates, capital gains, and other taxes during the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II administrations. The Secretary is apparently incapable of reading a line chart, or of comprehending that the percentage of Americans employed rose from 57% in 1983 to 63% in 2008.

Geithner, of course, is saying these things only to defend the president. It is the president who plans to raise taxes on the rich, as he likes to call everyone earning more than $200,000 — even those who reinvest that money in small businesses and create new jobs. Somehow the president believes that robbing small businesses of every dime of profit is going to kick-start the economy. Once again, just about every economist except Paul Krugman disagrees with him. As Sen. Mitch McConnell pointed out on Aug. 4, the tax increases scheduled for Jan. 1, 2011 “will have a devastating impact” on the economy.

If the President really thinks that raising taxes will promote growth, why not raise taxes on everyone? More taxes, more growth. Why not let government take everything, as it already has, almost, in California and New York? If higher taxes produce jobs, where are the jobs in California and New York? Why were more new jobs created in low-tax Texas in 2009 than in the other 49 states combined?

Maybe it’s just that the Democrats have a different definition of “jobs” from most people’s. For Democrats, a job is not a job unless it’s “green.” A job need not be real — it can be “created or saved” or bought with stimulus spending. For Nancy Pelosi, collecting unemployment benefits is a job in itself. And for Tim Geithner, raising taxes on some is the precondition for putting others back to work.

The fact is that Obama’s economic policies have always been laughable. The $862-billion stimulus spending of 2009 distributed massive funding to welfare recipients, alternative energy boondoggles, environmental regulation enforcement, unionized education, and public service workers. But the spending bonanza was never intended to create jobs. It was designed to buy votes, as was the latest stimulus bill signed by the president on August 10.

Meanwhile, the economy overall has lost six million jobs since the recession began, most of them since the inauguration of Barack Obama; 14.6 million Americans are now out of work. Millions of ordinary Americans have been sacrificed so that the Democratic Party can retain the votes of welfare recipients, teachers, public service unions, and environmentalists — and what’s more important, the campaign contributions of unions, environmental groups, and trial lawyers.

If the president really wished to create jobs, he could do so in several ways. He could reduce marginal tax rates across the board, thereby returning billions of dollars to their rightful owners. He could cut capital gain, dividend, and interest taxes, thus increasing business investment and spurring expansion. He could promote tort reform and eliminate unnecessary environmental regulation. Most importantly, he could lower taxes on businesses and corporations.

Obama has done none of these things. The only “solution” he has proposed is raising taxes and distributing more stimulus funds to his key constituencies.

There are 14.6 million unemployed, and the president’s solution is to raise taxes so as to distribute more taxpayer money to his political supporters. Apparently Obama is so callous or so blind that he cannot comprehend what it means for 14.6 million families to lose a breadwinner. Everything that he has done, and that he continues to do, serves only his own interest. He appears to be ruthlessly intent on a single objective: securing his political base in advance of the 2012 election. No matter if fourteen or twenty or fifty million Americans go hungry.

HT: American Thinker

If she had, she would have seen that President Obama’s lack of cojones extends far beyond border security — it extends to our national security more broadly. President Obama, simply put, has no cojones when it comes to defending and protecting this nation from threats at home and abroad. His leadership style is more waxed chest and eyebrow trim than alpha male; he’s our first metrosexual president, an elitist who believes that sweet-talking and willful blindness to the nature of our enemies are a recipe for a success.

Being President of the United States is not an episode of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” where subtle commentary and snarky remarks produce results. It’s more like an episode of “Walker, Texas Ranger,” where there are good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys need a roundhouse kick to the face. But President Obama is busy watching Bravo.

Nowhere is Obama’s lack of metaphoric testosterone clearer than in his tack with the Ground Zero mosque issue. Obama said that the mosque should be built because this is a simple “freedom of religion” issue, which of course is false — the mosque can be built anywhere, just not on the secular holy site that is Ground Zero. Obama’s bizarre argument is equivalent to stating that it would be a “freedom of speech” issue if the KKK wanted to build a grand headquarters on the assassination site of Martin Luther King, Jr. In both cases, the principles of freedom of religion/speech are not risked by utilizing basic common sense.

The real issue here is the one Obama did not address: the responsibility of Islamism for the 9/11 attacks, and the association between the Muslims backing the Ground Zero mosque and Islamist ideology. Obama doesn’t believe Islamism is responsible for 9/11; in Dreams From My Father, he instead blames terrorism on economic imbalances (a Marxist and eunuch-ian response to the most devastating attack on American soil in history). And so for him, this is an easy decision — by simply eliding the larger issue, he can turn this into a case of xenophobia by anti-Ground Zero mosque Americans.

It’s not happenstance that Obama’s stance on the Ground Zero mosque is the most politically convenient for him; if he acknowledged the nature of our enemies, he’d have to rethink his entire foreign policy framework. He’d have to recognize that precipitous pullouts in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t merely politically problematic, but also highly dangerous; he’d have to admit that the Muslims in the Middle East aren’t interested in making peace with the Jews in Israel; he’d have to see that the problem of Islamism isn’t merely a class or race problem, but a philosophical problem that crosses all borders. In short, he’d have to wake up to the fact that Islamism is a real threat at home and abroad.

But that wouldn’t go along with his blithe — dare we say feminine? — attitude toward our enemies, who he believes are tortured souls longing for American apologetics rather than cruel and brutal bastards bent on imposition of Shariah. In fact, Obama does Muslims a disservice by associating the imperialistic Islamism of the Ground Zero mosque — and yes, it is imperialistic — with Islam everywhere. There is a reason that Hamas has endorsed the Ground Zero mosque, and there is a reason the founder of the Ground Zero mosque refuses to disown terror against Israelis, and there is a reason he blames America for the attacks on 9/11. It’s because he’s a representative of an ideology that is political as much as it is religious, an ideology that seeks to overthrow the U.S. government and replace it with a barbaric tyranny. That Islamism should not be protected by the First Amendment in the first place.

Obama, as he has repeatedly informed us, was born and raised at least for part of his life a Muslim. He knows and thinks beautiful the call of the muezzin, he has said. That makes his ignorance of Islamism less pathetic than it is purposeful — purposeful and cojone-less. As our president, Obama must protect us from totalitarian ideologies. This is by far the most significant responsibility in his job description. He refused that responsibility this week.

We need a leader, not a womyn’s studies professor. Strike that — womyn’s studies professors are, by and large, twice as masculine as our current president. I would suggest that President Obama “cowboy up,” even though we already know what he thinks of cowboys. Unfortunately, his EZ-Bake Oven, Polly Pocket politics play right into the hands of our enemies.

HT: American Thinker

Tito Guirao-Aguilar

8/5/2010 – Dave Gibson -

Police in Williamsburg, Va., have arrested a juvenile, whose name is being withheld due to his age for repeatedly raping a 6-year-old girl. His arrest comes after two others, Tito Guirao-Aguilar, 39, and Samuel Eli Jacobo-Guirao, 20, were apprehended for victimizing the girl.

Guirao-Aguilar has been charged with three counts of aggravated sexual battery of a person under the age of 13, and Jacobo-Guirao is charged with one count of rape of a person under the age of 13 and two counts of aggravated sexual battery of a person under 13.

Both men are being held in the Virginia Peninsula Regional Jail without bond. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also placed a hold on them.

The most popular tourist destination in the state, Williamsburg has a growing crime problem attributable to its illegal alien population, who are largely employed by the hotel and restaurant industry.

On June 10, Williamsburg police arrested illegal alien Raul Vasquez-Garcia, 33, in front of the same apartment complex where he allegedly shot a man, a week earlier.

On the night of June 4, police arrived at the Village of Woodshire apartments on Merrimac Trail, they found a man suffering from two gunshot wounds. According to police, the man and Vasquez-Garcia had been arguing over a woman.

The victim was taken to a local hospital, where he recovered from his wounds and has since been released.

Vasquez-Garcia is charged with attempted murder, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony and assault.

HT: Examiner.com